There is reason to believe, from statements published in the
Times of Friday, that another immense calamity has fallen upon China. Famine, it is stated, has fallen upon the vast and over-populated provinces of Honan, Shantung, and Chihli, famine caused—first, by the bursting of the dykes of the Yellow River ; secondly, by the extraordinary local floods of the last wet season ; and thirdly, by a failure of the rice crop. In October, Dr. Nevins, the missionary, visited a district of Shantung covering six thousand square miles, and found it reduced to a kind of marsh, amidst which the people were living, without shelter, on the higher lands. The towns had been swept away, and the very earth from the plains, and where earth was left, the soil was too saturated to grow anything. The people had nothing to eat except a tasteless grass, and were emigrating at the rate of two thousand a day towards the provinces desolated by the last famine, when eleven millions perished, and where, consequently, land is cheap. The people march driving wheelbarrows loaded with their small possessions ; but if the wife falls sick, all is over for the family, the husband
being too weak from hunger to push the barrow with her in it. This account comes from one district alone, and there is grave reason to apprehend that it is true of provinces containing forty millions of people. The missionaries ask aid ; but it is the misfortune of China that it always appears, with its endless areas and swarming tribes, to be outside the possible range of charitable effort. The Pekin Treasury, it is said, is powerless, being exhausted by its effort to rebuild the river dykes,—an effort which has failed.
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